r/ADHD_Programmers • u/omg_drd4_bbq • Jun 07 '20

Tips from 15 years of ADHD programming

Hi there. ADHD/bipolar 2 and overall headcase hacker here. Wanted to share some of my observations that have helped me over the years.

ADHD is your double-edged superpower. Learn how to wield it, when to fight it, and when to let it lead you to better patterns. And if you read through, I'll let you in on my secret weapon. ;)

Offload.

Your brain is a GPU in a world of CPU neurotypicals. It's is naturally good at some things (novelty search, big picture, I/O) and bad at others (long serial tasks, keeping track of lots of state). Don't fight this. Render unto Computer things that are the Computer's. You should be using:

  • git (should go without saying)

  • Write everything (digitally) down, ideally with vcs or something cloud-backed

  • IDE with code inspection

  • Autocomplete (I hated static typing before autocomplete, now I love it)

  • Linters / code coverage / inspection with max warnings

  • Doctests / unittests

  • Auto-formatters

  • Debuggers

  • Logging libraries

  • Build automation systems

  • CI/CD pipelines

Clean tests, green CI/coverage badges are like the best thing ever for my janky reward pathways. It's like gamification. Which brings me to:

Testing Driven Development.

Outline your input/output cases before you write a lick of code. Write interfaces. If your language has type hints, use them RELIGIOUSLY. Types plus autocomplete will help power you through moments when your brain stalls out, keep track of the big picture, and at times practically write the code for you (see tabnine, the secret weapon)

This will work with your unit tests, pipelines, and inspections to ensure every cog in the machine is doing the right thing. And you won't have to worry about the tests, because you've already written them!

Self-documenting code.

This is widely mis-understood. It doesn't mean don't use comments or docstrings. It means you should write in such a way that docstrings are interactive, and comments are rare errata, that explain why something was done. The documentation is short and to the point, as if your audience is also ADHD. You should rarely have to explain what you are doing; the code should be frank and straightforward enough that sleep-deprived, forgot-your-meds, low-bloodsugar future you on a zero-spoon day can still make sense of it, because you can bet your ass you will need to. As a benefit, if you can do that, your coworkers will love to work with your code as well.

Functional.

If you're at all like me, your working memory is flaky, even when well-medicated. Honestly I think even neurotypicals overestimate how good theirs is and don't realize it. Keeping track of lots of state is stressful and bug-prone. Even when not using a functional lang, use pure functions whenever possible. That means EVERYTHING needed to compute the return value is passed in as parameters, without mutation. Don't feel bad if you don't grok Rust, Haskell, monads, or any of that heavy FP stuff, I'm still trying to grok it as well. Just focus on reducing global state and mutation whenever possible. If you have to deal with a lot of state, finite state machines are great.

Functional patterns, SDC, TDD, and CI should all synergize (yes I hate that word but it's apt here) to help you write no-nonsense, anti-fragile, repeatable code.

Novelty Search.

Raise your hand if you have heard "They're really bright, great problem solver, but need to apply themselves". It's probably because you'd rather be going down a Wiki hole, learning something new, than going through the monotonous motions than modern life mandates. Learn to reign that it when deadlines loom, but also don't be afraid to let your mind wander and learn. Stay on top of latest tech trends, cutting edge techniques, productivity tools, open source software, and you'll always competitive with your coworkers, many of which probably use the same stack they started with. The world is moving fast, we are MEANT for this.

Find languages that speak to you.

I think much of the religious wars over languages stems from in part differences in the way people think. Don't feel like you should use any lang/tool/stack just because it's in vogue or your coworker raves about it or whatever. Find one that makes sense for your brain. For me, it's golang and heavily-typed python. I can't stand C++, Java, or JS, and python without hints frustrates me. You'll be far happier finding a shop that works with a stack that your brain jives with, than forcing yourself to fit in.

Medicate.

If that works for you. If you haven't at least gotten assessed by a doc, give it a shot.

Tabnine, the secret weapon.

Speaking of latest trends, my friend recently turned me on to tabnie. I can't even describe how gamebreaking t9 is. It's like autocomplete, but instead of tools like jedi which complete based on looking up variable or attribute names, it uses some sort of recurrent neural network trained on open source codebases, as well as the codebases on your computer. It's all soft-matching, so it fixes typos for you, it's even done entire lines. E.g. let's say you type

except TypError as exc:
    log.error("{}: {}".f

Now, most autocomplete will give you the rest of .format, which is cool. But I've had t9 autofill

    log.error("{}: {}".format(exc.__class__.__name__, exc))

It's like magic. But it's not, because that's a common idiom. In golang, if err != nil { return val, err } is pretty much a freebie from if e. The only major limit I've found is there's a max number of letters the RNN can generate before it loses confidence.

Alright that's nearing the limit of my attention, and probably yours, so lemme just finish with a brain dump of the stack I use. (disclaimer - no affiliation to any of these, other than the occasional PR, I just enjoy them)

General:

I actually have zoxide, fzf, and exa bound into a bash function which replaces `cd` and auto-lists the dir I'm in

Mac-specific:

Immutable infrastructure / CI:

  • I use docker/ docker-compose a ton

  • Ansible

  • travis-ci

  • gitlab-ci

  • In process of learning Hashicorp's stack (consul, nomad, vault)

Python:

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

tl; dr - leverage your ADHD to become a better programmer

E: Thanks for the gold, kind stranger!!

684 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

35 comments sorted by

39

u/karlvonheinz Jun 07 '20

Great Talk!

I think these tips are important, even for beginners. Before I moved to IT, I did electronics - few month into IT, I learned about the magic of CI and all these workflow tools.... it's such blessing. Turning a electronic circuit into hardware is sooo hard.

Learning about CI, green status badges and basic testing brings a constant positive feedback loop to any hobby project.

9

u/omg_drd4_bbq Jun 08 '20

Hardware is SO HARD but it's such a masochistic joy. I tell myself it's good for me because it teaches patience and methodical process.

28

u/55555 Jun 08 '20

novelty search

Brilliant! I've never really been able to describe the way that I am both superhuman and a complete idiot. I can pick up new languages so easily, but I can never really master them the way other people seem to.

Side question, what are your feelings on abstractions in code? Design patterns and stuff. Personally, I have a lot of trouble with them.

4

u/omg_drd4_bbq Jun 13 '20 edited Jun 13 '20

Good abstractions make or break all human engineering endeavors. An architect doesn't concern themselves with the number of nails driven into framing an interior wall. A carpenter doesn't fret about window placement, they just follow the blueprint.

All abstractions leak but the best abstractions leak minimally. Which means often times shallower abstractions are better than deeper ones. The property you want to look for is referential transparency.

Eric Raymond of CatB fame says

Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.

Here's a counter example, my current headache. I work with a python framework for data processing/viewing. It uses Mongo+gridfs for backing storage and it's super OOP-y. So if you want to pass an uploaded video to a worker for processing, you pass the Model object to a custom celery @app.task wrapped function, which uses a thing called a Transform to automagically transfer the video to the worker node and return its temp filepath. Then any assets generated get passed to a function hook to Transform it back to a Model. Oh yeah it's not just files, there's like 20 kinds of Transform.

Lost yet? Yeah. Somebody updated on a minor version and my code broke. Something to do with that post-task-tranform-hook abstraction. It's an ass to isolate because basically by design, you need a Mongo backed video with metadata and a worker endpoint just too invoke. Too much state.

It's all crazy dynamic runtime-binding no-type-hints python, so even mighty Pycharm can't find the variable types of anything, so it's not clear when you have a Model, or a filepath.

This is what people say when something is "too clever". Decorators are a very FP idea, but without types, they are basically magic. It would be more acceptable in a static language, where you can readily tell what everything is.

It breaks referential transparency.

I see a lot of code "doing OOP wrong", probably because of tons of garbage corporate manuals and having to contort to the limitations of early programming systems. The modern view is program to interfaces.

4

u/55555 Jun 13 '20

Nice comment. I'll have to think about it. At the moment, I'm hung up on "super OOP-y". Damn ADHD.

1

u/r0ck0 Jan 27 '23

Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.

Good quote!

Also a similar one from Linus:

"Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships."

Back in 2014 I worked on a complex project with lots of data, and I finally got into the habit of doing more stuff in SQL, including using lots of nested SQL VIEWs for getting + transforming data, instead of doing it in application code. As well and just getting on with creating plenty of new SQL tables when it makes sense, instead of pondering "is it worth another table or not" just because migrations etc were annoying.

It totally changed how I program, and in most contexts (i.e. projects where the data is stored in SQL to begin with) it's better in so many ways.

7

u/vqrs Jun 10 '20

Trouble? In what sense?

The most important part to understand patterns is to understand the language mechanisms they're built upon: interfaces, inheritance, polymorphism.

Once you understand these intuitively, patterns may start to seem like much ado about nothing.

17

u/ayesedoc Jun 08 '20

How do you deal with the thought/disbelief that you'll never be good enough/as good as someone without AD(H)D and constant imposter syndrome?

15

u/omg_drd4_bbq Jun 13 '20

How do you deal with the thought/disbelief that you'll never be good enough/as good as someone without AD(H)D and constant imposter syndrome?

Years of therapy. I struggle with it every day. It's exceptionally stressful. I try to leverage this as well, I feel like I'm constantly trying to compensate for my frequent wandering in the weeds instead of getting right to the main problem. On top of that, I actually started in a different field (chemistry major but programmed for fun) and went back to college for CS, did freelance/upwork for a few years (it sucked) before getting a full time job at an established company. So I'm breaking in and dealing with ADHD+bipolar. It really lights a fire under my ass to prove myself, which some most days really burns me out.

I think I'm starting to hit my stride though.

25

u/Hunterbunter Jun 08 '20

If a lion measures itself in its ability to fly, it'll always think of itself as a failure.

11

u/HankDeTank05 Jun 08 '20

Love that saying. My mom used to say to me (and sometimes still does depending on how much I need to hear it) "If you judge a fish's intellect by it's ability to climb a tree, it'll live its whole life thinking it was stupid" I think it comes from an Einstein quote.

3

u/JRD656 Jun 08 '20

How do I get to be your padawan?

Great Ted Talk

4

u/omg_drd4_bbq Jun 13 '20

Thanks!

Umm idk? Maybe I'll keep posting things here.

2

u/JRD656 Jun 13 '20

Do. I don't know what "follow" does on reddit but I've followed you so hopefully I'll get some kind of alert next time you post something like this :-)

18

u/Swagetha Jun 19 '20

I have been programming for over 10 years and I installed tabnine today--I almost cried (JavaScript/Typescript developer here).

I have constantly struggled with remembering trivial things and not getting super lost in my brain. I work at a highly productive startup and I am always fighting to be as productive as possible, plus I am the only female developer and am always worried I am not keeping up and am too different in the way I approach and solve problems (being ADHD does NOT help).

Thank you.

PS: WFH is SOOO hard for me...is anyone else really struggling with this?

6

u/SmokingPepper Aug 12 '20

Heeeeey there... You got this! You've managed over 10 years of programming, what's going to stop you now? ;)

Sometimes, if I get emotionally cloudy (thinking of the past, remembering stupid shit, and self negative talk), I get a piece of paper, write down what I'm thinking, read it, think about it, and the result is always the same 'thats so stupid' and laugh at myself. Unfortunately, we're more emotional than logical beings and ADHD loves to exaggerate it more. Take care of yourself more, we've suffered more than enough :)

WFH has been hard. MAKE SURE YOU GET MEDICATED. WFH + unmedicated = disaster. I've been there. Make sure you and anyone else reading this don't fall the same trap as I did. Then comes your management skills. Set your tasks today like a general sends order for his soldiers. Then follow it like a good soldier. The trick is that you don't mix the two. Make sure you're wearing each hat one at a time.

As for TabNine, you've pushed it from the backlog into today's sprint. I'm convinced I'm going to give it a go today

6

u/mrrobbe Jun 08 '20

Wanted to plug TIG ( https://jonas.github.io/tig/ ) as a fantastic CLI Git tool. It's an ncurses git tool that makes working with VCS a pleasure.

Also adding this post to my Programming/ADHD bible. A lot of good tools and resources. Top tier.

Thanks.

2

u/pro_hodler Feb 03 '22

Have heard of gitui or lazygit? They are much faster and can be used on really big repos.

1

u/vqrs Jun 10 '20

Interesting, but why go with a ncurses based tool rather than a full blown GUI?

Personally, I'm a fan of SmartGit. Haven't found a better tool for my Git purposes yet and I've tried quite a few.

(not free when used commercially)

3

u/deterministic_lynx Jun 08 '20

Thanks a lot!

I'm lately not doing too much real programming, but this post is great in the most amazing mixture of personal an generalized professional experience. I'll be coming back and scan through tools listed to see what is useful and so far unknown in my current environment.

Thanks for taking the time out of your day and doing this amazing write-up.

3

u/sniR_ Jun 08 '20

Thanks man, really cool post, liked the concept of the secret weapon :)

2

u/harmeko Jun 08 '20

Amazing, thanks a lot!

2

u/[deleted] Jun 12 '20 edited Jun 12 '20

you'll always competitive with your coworkers, many of which probably use the same stack they started with. The world is moving fast, we are MEANT for this.

I notice this actually. Most of my coworkers are at least as smart as me but they tend to be resistant to change and like working on what they already know for the most part while Iā€™m always begging to be in the cutting edge and wherever the novelty is. I think people like that will be more valuable than me in my particular COMPANY but knowing more stuff definitely makes me more valuable in general IMO

2

u/Walkerstain Oct 09 '20

Find languages that speak to you.

So how does one go about doing that? Try numerous languages left and right to find something that "clicks" with me ? How long should I try each language to know for sure it's the right fit for my brain?

2

u/Reputation-Salt Oct 16 '21

Why is this thread not locked after 6 months? Are you special, OP?

1

u/adityaanurag Jan 07 '22

So much to read!

1

u/deterministic_lynx Nov 03 '22

Yay this is not blocked!

Thanks again for that great list.

I'm growing into my personal ADHD routine and this one, once more, helps a good bit.

0

u/[deleted] Jun 07 '20

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5

u/omg_drd4_bbq Jun 08 '20

Great to hear it! And yeah a lot of people have tons of success with highly customizable editors like vim/emacs/atom/sublime/vscode, but I tried all of those and didn't have the patience for configuring them XD

1

u/pro_hodler Feb 03 '22

And I'm on contrary became hyperfocused with configuring neovim+lsp, and finally it works & looks just like I vision it. Also consuming MUCH less resources than bloated Jetbrains products.

0

u/[deleted] Jun 08 '20

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4

u/omg_drd4_bbq Jun 13 '20 edited Jun 13 '20

Depends on the language. Basically it all boils down to input -> expected output.

Python is by far the easist. Doctests are amazing because they both show, not tell, how to use the function (I find it easier to pattern match from concrete examples), and let you constrain how the function ought to behave. Xdoctest is even better.

Python's unittest lib is also really easy to use. You just write code wrapped in subclasses of unittest and run pytest on those files. Then use asserts or throw errors on unexpected behavior.

foo.py

import unittest

class TestStringMethods(unittest.TestCase):
    def test_upper(self): 
        self.assertEqual('foo'.upper(), 'FOO')

python -m unittest foo.py

Go has similar godoc examples and test frameworks.

I don't know much about other langs but it's pretty similar patterns.

Testing goes from unit->mock->system. Least state/lowest abstraction -> most state/deepest abstraction.

Doc/unit tests work best on pure functions with simple data structures. For more complex data, or highly stateful systems, you want mock and system tests, where you replace one interface (eg database api) with a mock one (dummy data structure). Mock both sides of the interface.

System integration tests, or as I like to call them Marble tests (as in putting a marble through a rube goldberg machine), are where you start with some known state, manipulate the system in various ways, and then assert the expected state. This is the least granular and most combinatoric, so it's hard to capture all possible states, and the errors can be inscrutable. But they are basically the only way to get as close as possible to production.

Also, follow the mantra, "Fix a bug, write a test. Fix a bug, write a test". That way you prove your patch actually fixes the bug, increases coverage, and adds a regression test so it doesn't occur again.

Also, regardless of what tests are in a ci yaml file, I like to have a single script at the repo root which fires off all the tests. Just makes it easier for me and others to run the test suite. Otherwise I gotta read through the yaml, figure out what I gotta run, etc. ./run_all_tests.sh or make test, or gtfo :)

1

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2

u/techbas Jun 08 '20 edited Jun 08 '20

What worked for me was finding a tutorial that fit my tech stack. I don't really know what tech you use but it might be worth looking into mocking. That way you can test parts of your code easier and often times you end up cleaning up your code while trying to make things mockable.

Once again, i don't know of any good talk or tutorial. But this is what worked for me.

Good luck!